Gone to press

By Matt Born

12:01AM BST 30 May 2003

So farewell, then, Fiona. After eight years of loyal service as Cherie Blair's gatekeeper and press handler, Fiona Millar has finally decided she's off.

The reason, we are reliably informed by the Daily Mail, is the influence Carole Caplin - mystic, fashion consultant and lifestyle guru - continues to hold over the prime minister's wife. "Fiona is incredibly loyal," a source close to Millar told the Mail, "[but she's] had enough."

Millar, like her boyfriend, Alastair Campbell, is no great fan of newspapers, particularly their reporting of the shenanigans of the Blairs' Inner Court. But even she must have been delighted with the coverage she received at the weekend.

Cynics might regard the fact that the "news" of her planned departure leaked on the Saturday of a Bank Holiday weekend - which ensured it was still being written about on the Monday - as suspiciously convenient.

But this column prefers to see it as simply a felicitous coincidence and delights in the knowledge that, whatever its origins, it is all for the best as far as Millar is concerned. For one benefit of the early reports of her departure is that it saves her sending out CVs.

Indeed, it is a recurring irony of New Labour that for all its efforts to undermine the Lobby, its senior apparatchiks have been more than happy to use the press to advertise their wares when the time comes for them to move on.

Godric Smith, Number 10's official spokesman, did just this a few weeks ago when he announced he was going at, well, some time over the next year or so. Smith is, by all accounts, a thoroughly good egg. So the Lobby hacks were happy to help him on his way, covering news of his departure with stories that were also gushing character references.

Millar, too, is well-liked in the Lobby and can expect a similarly warm send off.

But if all this makes you misty-eyed, and bemoaning the fact that you haven't received an invitation to her leaving do, don't despair just yet. For a closer textual analysis of the story - otherwise known as reading the quotes - suggests it may not be all it first seems. At no point, for example, has Millar herself announced her departure, leaving it instead to "friends" to reveal her desire to spend more time with her three children.

And that bestows the news with a useful deniability. "It has all the hallmarks of a classic New Labour story", says one Lobby insider. "There are no direct sources, no time limit and no one has to stick by it." So what is going on? If Millar was serious about wanting to resume her writing career (she is a former journalist with the Daily Express), surely she would simply have come out and said so? Her silence suggests there is another story at work here.

Millar, as the reports over the past week have made abundantly clear, has had a tempestuous relationship with Caplin, who she regards as a crank.

In particular, she has been alarmed by the fact that the bond between the Prime Minister's wife and her style adviser has grown stronger in the wake of the Cheriegate scandal, in which Caplin's boyfriend, the convicted fraudster Peter Foster, helped Cherie buy two flats in Bristol.

But just how strong, even Millar may only recently have realised. According to sources in Westminster, Caplin has persuaded Mrs Blair to do a major interview with the Mail on Sunday.

What makes this so galling for Millar is that she is supposed to be in charge of Cherie's press. To make matters worse, it was the MoS which led the charge over Cheriegate and is also the paper which is now paying Caplin more than £80,000 to write a weekly column. Which brings us back to the news of Millar's departure. That the story first appeared in the Daily Mail is in itself interesting. They may be stablemates, but - in the ongoing absence of Paul Dacre, the editor-in-chief of both titles - an intense rivalry exists between executives on the sister papers. If anyone wanted to scupper the MoS chances of landing a scoop with the Blairs, this was a good way to do it.

Noteworthy too is the fact that the story was not written by one of the Mail's political correspondents but by two general news reporters who gleefully dredged up stories of Cherie's spiritual credulity.

The net effect will have been to revive Cherie's antipathy towards the press - and, especially, Associated Newspapers. And if it does, it won't have enhanced Caplin's position in the power-struggle for the hearts and minds of the Blair family.

In which case, Millar may not leave after all. And that's the trouble with spin doctors. You never know when to believe them . . . or their friends.